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Glittering Vices Brazos Press, a Division of Baker Publishing Group, © 2020 SECOND EDITION G LI T T E R I NG VICES A New Look at the Seven Deadly Sins and Their Remedies S Rebecca DeYoung, Glittering Vices Brazos Press, a division of Baker Publishing Group, © 2020. Used by permission. _DeYoung_GlitteringVices_BB_djm.indd 3 4/3/20 1:30 PM Contents Preface vii Acknowledgments xi 1. Why Study the Vices? 1 2. Gifts from the Desert: The Origins and History of the Vices Tradition 21 3. Vainglory: Image Is Everything 41 4. Envy: Feeling Bitter When Others Have It Better 67 5. Sloth (Acedia): Resistance to the Demands of Love 87 6. Avarice: Possession and Mastery 111 7. Wrath: Holy Emotion or Hellish Passion? 137 8. Gluttony: Feeding Your Face and Starving Your Heart 163 9. Lust: Sexuality Stripped Down 189 10. The Rest of the Journey: Self- Examination, the Seven Capital Vices, and Spiritual Formation 217 Epilogue 235 Notes 243 Index 269 v Rebecca DeYoung, Glittering Vices Brazos Press, a division of Baker Publishing Group, © 2020. Used by permission. _DeYoung_GlitteringVices_BB_djm.indd 5 4/3/20 1:30 PM 1 Why Study the Vices? To flee vice is the beginning of virtue. — Horace, Epistles In the first year of my professional training in philosophy, I found myself in graduate school, wondering if I belonged somewhere else. Everyone in my classes seemed so smart, so witty, so well read, so eager and able to ask brilliant and insightful questions. I felt like an impostor. How did I— obviously so inferior—ever get admitted with these people? How soon would they find out who I really was (or wasn’t) and quietly shoo me out the back door in disgrace? Partly I struggled with genuinely difficult philosophical texts, and some difficult life circumstances; mostly, however, I struggled with my own sense of inadequacy. So instead of engaging in class discussions and seeking out opportunities to improve myself, I spent that first year of graduate school pulling back into the shadows, believing I had nothing much to contribute, hoping no one would notice when I wrote or said something stupid.1 A few years later, while reading Thomas Aquinas on the virtue of cour- age, I happened across a vice he called pusillanimity, which means “small- ness of soul.” Those afflicted by this vice, wrote Aquinas, shrink back from all that God has called them to be. When faced with the effort and 1 Rebecca DeYoung, Glittering Vices Brazos Press, a division of Baker Publishing Group, © 2020. Used by permission. _DeYoung_GlitteringVices_BB_djm.indd 13 4/3/20 1:30 PM Glittering Vices difficulty of stretching themselves to the great things of which they are capable, they cringe and say, “I can’t.” Their faintheartedness comes from relying on their own puny powers and focusing on their own potential for failure, instead of counting on God’s grace to equip them for great kingdom work— work beyond anything they would have dreamed of for themselves. Picture Moses at the burning bush, said Aquinas. The future leader of Israel, called to lead them in one of the greatest episodes of their history— the exodus from Egypt— stands there stuttering that he’s not qualified and asks God to send Aaron instead. Reading Aquinas’s account of the vice of pusillanimity felt like seeing myself in the mirror for the first time. It gave a name to my struggle, one that made sense of my anxiety and sense of unworthiness. At the same time, the biblical portrait of Moses presented inspiring evidence that God’s power and grace can transform even—or especially—the weakest and most fearful of us.2 Moses’s pusillanimity did not have the last word in his life; God did. It’s a bit ironic, I suppose, that the discovery of this vice in myself turned out to be not only illuminating but also liberating. At last, I understood what held me back. Calling it by name was a small yet significant step toward gradually wresting free of its grip. It took a bracing word from Aquinas to show me that my fear of failure in graduate school was not the main problem; my pusillanimity was really a symptom of my lack of trust in God. How could I have missed something so basic? That I shrank back from all God called me to be and that I judged my own abilities as inadequate because I was not relying on God’s grace and strength— these insights are so obvious that I should have seen them for myself. Yet seeing ourselves clearly is often difficult. Sometimes we need to hear a precise diagnosis from someone else, and to hear it at a particular time. I have often joked that every time I read Aquinas I discover another vice I didn’t realize I had. Perhaps you don’t run the risk of becoming a moral hypochondriac who finds yourself guilty of a new sin every day. Nonethe- less, my sense is that most of us would benefit from some deeper moral reflection and self- examination— as I did in graduate school. A study of personal vices can catalyze spiritual growth, if it is done within the context of spiritual formation. In fact, the Christian tradition framed it that way from the beginning. My doorway into that tradition came through Aquinas. The project of spiritual formation finds a natural home in his work, since he does not organize his major text on the moral 2 Rebecca DeYoung, Glittering Vices Brazos Press, a division of Baker Publishing Group, © 2020. Used by permission. _DeYoung_GlitteringVices_BB_djm.indd 14 4/3/20 1:30 PM Why Study the Vices? life around the vices, but rather around the virtues and spiritual gifts. Aquinas’s focus and framework point to the people of good character we are meant to become. As our primary task, we should pursue righteousness and moral excellence— not obsess over our weakness and sin. The second part of the Summa theologiae on the virtues and vices culminates in the third part on Christ, who perfectly models virtue and gives us his Spirit so that we can imitate his example. Along with Aquinas and many others in the Christian tradition whose insights he drew upon, then, the present study will examine the vices within the context of spiritual formation. Inspired by the wisdom of this rich community of thought and practice, this book offers conceptual tools to illuminate our personal stories, en- ables penetrating diagnoses of our struggles with the vices, and— most important— gives us a glimpse of life and virtue beyond the entrapments of sin. Contemporary Treatments of the Seven Deadly Sins Reading Aquinas, I found the vices to have revealing and illuminating power. By contrast, many voices in contemporary culture dismiss, redefine, psychologize, or trivialize them. Some dismiss the vices on the grounds that they are not (or are no longer) moral problems at all. In a tract republished by NavPress, the Reverend James Stalker proclaims, “On the whole, I should be inclined to say, gluttony is a sin which the civilized man has outgrown; and there is not much need for referring to it in the pulpit.”3 Francine Prose, likewise, confuses gluttony with feasting in her chapter “Great Moments of Glut- tony,”4 and Robert Solomon questions “why God would bother to raise a celestial eyebrow” about the vices, given that “the ‘deadly sins’ barely jiggle the scales of justice”— as if sloth were nothing more than “a bloke who can’t get out of bed,” lust nothing more than “one too many peeks at a Playboy pictorial,” and gluttony nothing more than “scarf[ing] down three extra jelly doughnuts.”5 Businesses and philosophers alike commend envy as incentivizing competitiveness and motivating greater ambition.6 Dismissals of the vices as irrelevant or trivial would be serious charges indeed if they had anything much to do with the traditional conceptions of sloth, lust, gluttony, and the rest. Other authors attempt to redefine the seven vices as virtues—and to recommend them as such. In most of these cases too, what they are talking 3 Rebecca DeYoung, Glittering Vices Brazos Press, a division of Baker Publishing Group, © 2020. Used by permission. _DeYoung_GlitteringVices_BB_djm.indd 15 4/3/20 1:30 PM Glittering Vices about has little or no relation to the original vice. For example, Michael Eric Dyson celebrates “black pride” in his book on the vice of pride.7 And Wendy Wasserstein’s hilarious parody of sloth offers a rigorous “self- improvement plan” for becoming lazier.8 As the book jacket promises, “To help you attain the perfect state of indolent bliss, the book offers a wealth of self- help aids. In it, readers will find the sloth songbook, sloth breakfast bars (with a delicious touch of Ambien), sloth documentaries (such as the author’s 12-hour epic on Thomas Aquinas), and the sloth network, programming guaranteed not to stimulate or challenge in any way.” Martin Marty reports that the French sent a delegation to the Vatican to get gluttony off the list, because la gourmandise (the French term usu- ally translated as “gluttony”) connotes not gluttony but “a warmhearted approach to the table, to receiving and giving pleasure through good company and food.”9 Articles commending slothful sleep habits to overly busy Americans claim that more rest will boost our productivity.10 More perniciously, Simon Blackburn rejects altogether the notion of disordered sexual desire in his book on lust. “Everything is all right,” he reassures us. “By understanding it for what it is, we can reclaim lust for humanity, and we can learn that lust flourishes best when it is unencumbered by bad philosophy and ideology, by falsities, by controls .
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